Tomorrow’s Snow: A Hopeful Lullaby
In Tomorrow’s Snow (Übermorgen Schnee), photojournalist and artist Sonja Trabandt portrays her best friend A.’s fight against cancer. In still life photographs, anonymous portraits, medical scans, and landscapes, she tells a gripping story about overcoming the worst.
“I remember the exact moment when A. called me to tell me the diagnosis: Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a very fast-growing, malignant but curable tumor right next to the lungs already 9 cm in diameter. My legs bent, and I burst into tears,” Sonja says.
Six months after the diagnosis, when it was clear that A. would survive, Sonja Trabandt started documenting the road to recovery. “My friend’s cancer was so overwhelming to me. This project helped me to sort it all out, to distance myself a little and look at everything with an external view for a while, to get the bigger picture of what was happening.”
“Just as I needed the distance to be able to understand the bigger picture, these images might help the outsider to have a sober entrance and to deal with cancer more matter-of-factly without being absorbed in the story of this individual fate.”
The title Tomorrow’s Snow, or Übermorgen Schnee in the original language, is taken from a German children’s song from 1864 that Sonja’s mum used to sing to her when she was sick. “This song promises that, as the seasons change and time goes by, you will be healthy again. By choosing this title, the work turns into a hopeful lullaby. We were all waiting for the day when the snow falls, and A. would be fine again.”
“The shootings gave me the feeling of normality and gaining back control over the situation. Becoming an explorer instead of a bystander was good for me.”
After the treatment, the artist and A. traveled to Fuerteventura together. The bright shining, yet dead desert island became a symbolic landscape for A.’s inner wounds. Tomorrow’s Snow is built on symbols as Sonja uses colors and objects to tell the story.
“Exploring my friend’s most vulnerable side in her life struggle also revealed my own dismay and the close proximity between us. Not to run away but to look – until you even recognize beauty in this dark depth and draw strength from sharing it with each other.”
From the beginning, Sonja knew that Tomorrow’s Snow would become a book, this became part of the whole creative process. By planning the book, she could draw red lines between all the different images and see which ones worked and which didn’t. After getting funding from Stiftung Kulturwerk Bildkunst the book is now in its final phases, scheduled to be published at the end of August/beginning of September this year by Hartmann Books.
Sonja Trabandt
Sonja Trabandt has studied Communicational Design and did her Master’s degree in photography at the University of the Arts London (LCC). In her work, she investigates various emotional states and the environment that creates them. Combining conceptual work with classical documentary photography.
See more of Sonja Trabandt’s work
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